The Hope of Audacity

Obama administration may see a mandate to keep stonewalling

Voters didn’t just opt for gridlock in Washington last Tuesday, sending many of the same players back to continue battle.

They also approved of stonewalling.

In returning President Obama to office, voters sent a message that they don’t care about the Benghazi scandal in which four Americans died after the Obama administration failed utterly to either protect them in advance or come to their aid during the seven-hour assault on our Libyan embassy.

Then, in the weeks following the attacks – carried out conspicuously on Sept. 11 – the administration put forth a bogus cover story: that the murderous assault that killed our ambassador and three others was an outgrowth of a citizen protest in Benghazi over an anti-Muhammad video on the Internet.

The truth, as we now know and the administration has had to confess, is that there was never any protest to begin with – and that the administration knew very quickly that it was, in fact, a premeditated, al-Qaida-style attack.

Why the lies? Who issued the orders for top administration officials to lie through their teeth about the nature of the assault? Why the lax security? Why did the administration refuse repeated requests for security at the embassy? Why didn’t the administration move quickly to respond to the assault and perhaps save our people?

Some of us wanted to get to the bottom of these matters before the election. But with the help of an oddly indifferent news media, the Obama administration managed to kick the can past the election.

Now, emboldened by the voters’ stamp of approval on stonewalling, it appears the administration will be just as brazen if not more so in its attempts to sweep the Benghazi scandal under the rug: Due to his sex scandal – which was months in the making but which conveniently broke just days after the election and before the hearing – former CIA director David Petraeus was declared unavailable to testify at a congressional inquiry into Benghazi this week. And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – whose agency failed to protect our people in Libya and who, herself, was a major perpetrator of the “protest” hoax – has been said, conveniently enough, to be traveling.

As if the deaths of four people under her care aren’t important enough to change her travel plans.

Did administration officials think they could just make stuff up about a protest over a video – while seeing to it that the video’s producer was imprisoned – and that they’d never be found out?

Or did they just figure the American people wouldn’t care about being lied to in such a baldfaced way?

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So RA you support takin' a 22 to Gitmo and pop em' da head and save us a bundle. Close it real quick -why bother right? I thought it was the NeoCons who were suppose to be blood thirsty. No one is innocent and a few bumps in the road is tolerated with the death of innocent children and adults from drone attacks. Boy I bet they are lamenting the Bush years of just being captured and "tortured".

gotta love their comments ..."just imagine what if the economy really improves" just imagine if oh that wonderful word if what if obumler is right, sounds like a firm belief in obumlers plan which has never been explained except to hire more teachers, police.. ie govt workers and tax and regulate business to death. why dont we just hire half of everyone to dig holes and the the other half to fill them..then we can have full employment...obumler has no plan never did and never will .
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nofanofobama-About your 08:31 pm post- The real issue is that the government is printing money to cover the trillions in debt it is running up. We just need to look at Germany at the end of WWI to see where this goes! Click your heals together three times and say hail Hitler!

Just one simple question...without diverting the topic. Why does the coverup about the murder of American Citizens not seem to matter to liberals?
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That's an easy one, Angela. It's the murders that matter. It's the loss of life that's significant. The political response is meaningless -- unless you're one of those people interested in using a tragedy for political gain.

The murderers are the guilty party in this tragedy, and Americans with their heads screwed on straight have no problem understanding that.

If the murders couldn't have been prevented your argument might have some merit. But we now know they could have been. Now then their is paradigm shift of who is the real murderer responsible. So we need to find the people "culpable" in this murder. I know you could care less who Obama murders (american citizens without due process)-but come on. Your argument isn't logical and lame. The fact they did nothing is "meaningless" is a sad argument.

Uh! It is the murders that matter and the political response that is insignificant? Hmm- didn't Germany invade a European country as a political response to a murder at a boarder and start WW II by the invasion of Poland? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident Gee who knew!

"The murderers are the guilty party in this tragedy, and Americans with their heads screwed on straight have no problem understanding that."

So if I have information about a murder, but willfully withhold that information, and even give false information, there should be no legal ramifications? I think not. Most people who understand the law have no problem understanding that.

I guess I really don't understand what tangible result people expect to achieve here. 1) The Americans will not be unmurdered by this investigation. 2) W. wasn't held culpable by the American people for a terrorist attack that occurred on American soil, was preventable (actionable intelligence existed), and that killed over 2,000 people. With that reality in mind, the idea that a terrorist attack killing 3 people, in an unstable country that just experienced a violent civil war, will lead to significant findings of culpability for anyone but the murderers, is preposterous.

1) American's won't be "unmurdered" but the people responsible for it will be brought to justice.

2) "W." wasn't held culpable..... Was he watching live video and did nothing to stop it when he could? Did he claim that the attack was due to a protest that he knew didn't happen, just to win an election?

So Burn...you are saying that it is OK for the President to cover up KNOWN facts about murders, simply because it won't bring the victims back if he didn't? How are we supposed to follow that logic?

Biz, the intelligence timeline of events indicates these murders were not preventable by anyone but the murderers.

Carcraft, I'm pretty sure that an armed invasion is a little more than a political response.

Angela, "Like I said...you can't debate with someone who uses such twisted logic" -- I couldn't agree with you more.

"So if I have information about a murder, but willfully withhold that information, and even give false information, there should be no legal ramifications? I think not. Most people who understand the law have no problem understanding that."

Most people who understand the law understand that if you report confused and conflicted information where confused and conflicted information exists, and then correct that report as information is clarified, then anyone trying to create legal ramifications for that sequence of events is completely wasting their own time.

Angela, this may come as a surprise, but we don't live in a world where events are determined by the jousting of logic on internet forums. We live in a world where real people decide to do real things, and the record of those decisions is maintained by history. The history of the American response to terrorist attacks strongly indicates that people trying to get Americans to punish the Obama administration for a terrorist attack are wasting their time. When ideology tries to face off against history, it loses 9 times out of 10. The Right would go a long way towards righting their ship if they paid attention to this fact, rather than trying to create a parallel reality where everything always works out the way they expect rather than the way history dictates.

myfather, believe me -- I have no problem watching the far Right expend its energy on a lost cause. This inability to see the logic of looking to history to decide where one's efforts will be best spent only takes the far Right further out of the arena where real, effective action, with real consequences for the future, happens. Keep living the logic of banging your head on the wall because you're angered by the wall -- just don't expect the rest of the country to get in line.

"Biz, the intelligence timeline of events indicates these murders were not preventable by anyone but the murderers."

Again....not true. They asked for extra security repeatedly, and they were denied.

"Most people who understand the law understand that if you report confused and conflicted information where confused and conflicted information exists, and then correct that report as information is clarified, then anyone trying to create legal ramifications for that sequence of events is completely wasting their own time."

The president saw a live video feed that showed there was NO PROTEST, yet for weeks he told America it was a protest that got out of hand. That called lying, no matter how you twist it.